Facebook Shim Links

Having come across the existance of Link Shims I am getting more and more convinced that putting links on Facebook to promote local events.

Apart from seeing less activity than I expected I see that there could be other reasons that either QR codes or URLs posted to webpages is not going to work. The suspicion of "White Vans" parked and driving around the neighbourhood tends to make me think that local residents are not likely to click on these links.

The quote from BlueFlame suggests that a intermediary screen would have been displayed to the Facebook user and I think that this would deter many from proceeding.

The same would be the case even if the link were to be an address such as fobwc.co.uk or any other that related to the Church. I have already heard that tempusfugit arouses suspicion by one of the "Friends of BWC".

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What Facebook say - on their Engineering at Meta Page "A faster, better link shim"

I am not sure Meta intended this to be seen when someone makes a search for information on these links.

" Earlier this year, the Site Integrity team wrote about a tool called "link shim" to warn people about potentially spammy or malicious links. While this tool did an excellent job of protecting people, this implementation caused a delay while your browser performed an extra round trip to Facebook's servers in order to check the link for maliciousness and hide the referrer. "

Restricting the Referrer

In an attempt to control what information is available to Google Analytics, Facebook are using the Referrer Header Meta tag options.

This is what Facebook Engineering say:

" We still need to let the websites you navigate to know the traffic is from Facebook, but we also want to prevent them from reading the full source url. Otherwise, they could know where on the site you were when you clicked their link. In order to strike this balance, we've taken advantage of a new feature called the meta referrer, currently available in Chrome 17+ and Safari 6+. This allows us to specify how much of the source url to share with the external site via the Referer header. If you're using one of these supported browsers you can take advantage of this new feature. Otherwise, your browser will be routed to the slightly slower older system. "

blueflamesocialmedia

" For example, when you see a l.facebook or lm.facebook it means that someone passed through a Link Shim before landing on your site (the m is just for mobile). This person would have seen a warning and asked if they wanted to continue to a website or to cancel. "

Using Facebook to drive traffic to your business

I guess the first thing to realise is that Facebook is a business itself and they are hardly going to allow their users to run a business without getting benefit for themselves. I think that you have to be extremely careful if you do. Using Marketplace, for example, could result in a ban if you are not careful to make it clear that you are NOT a business.

In addition, Facebook offer business solutions for a price and they are not going to allow users to run their business for free on a personal account.

BlueFlame say:

" Are you driving traffic using Facebook and using Google Analytics to analyse that traffic? If you are – then you are likely to see multiple referrals like those seen above.
This is known as a Facebook Link Shim. "

BlueFlame on maliciousness:

Facebook claim that the reason for Link Shims is protect their users from "malicious" websites and to protect the indendities and personal data of their users. My "read" on this is that the main reason is to prevent personal users from "gaming" their platform. The reason for the pop-up messages when you click on a link in a Facebook post is simply to play on the insecurities of their users and to deter efforts to promote anything outside the "Metaverse".

As I have said before and have witnessed myself, when an internet user clicks on a link on a web page to another web resource they are very likely never to return.

" Mostly, these are triggered because of privacy not because of a malicious site. You can always open one of your links from Facebook and it will show you if a site has been flagged as it will show a warning. "

As I was saying with regard to the local situation, there is little point in trying to use Facebook to promote your cause. Sadly, many of those that are users of Facebook in the village and vicinity are never going to understand this. Statements such as "we need to post this to Facebook" are not going away anytime soon.